It drives me crazy when my monitors turn off while I’m watching a movie. If you want to quickly change the monitor timeout using the command line, it’s actually pretty simple.

The powercfg utility can be used on the command line to change power configuration settings, including the monitor timeout, which is what we’ll use here.

The command syntax:

powercfg -Change -monitor-timeout-ac 120

This will change the monitor setting to stay on for 120 minutes while on AC power. You can use -dc at the end to change the setting for when you are on battery power.

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Lowell is the founder and CEO of How-To Geek. He’s been running the show since creating the site back in 2006. Over the last decade, Lowell has personally written more than 1000 articles which have been viewed by over 250 million people. Prior to starting How-To Geek, Lowell spent 15 years working in IT doing consulting, cybersecurity, database management, and programming work.
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